Web Site Helped Change Farm Policy

By ELIZABETH BECKER

Published: February 24, 2002

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 — Throughout the angry Senate debate about whether to limit subsidies to wealthy farmers, lawmakers kept referring to "the Web site" to make their points.

"You can see on the Web site — 10 percent of the farmers get most of the money," said Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma.

"I looked up Indiana on the Web site," said Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, "and very few Indiana farmers would be affected by a modest limit."

No one had to ask, "What Web site?"

It is www.ewg.org, operated by the Environmental Working Group, a small nonprofit organization with the simple idea that the taxpayers who underwrite $20 billion a year in farm subsidies have the right to know who gets the money.

Conceived by Ken Cook, 50, director of the group, the Web site has become unusual in the crowded world of special-interest politics, where it is hard to get noticed in Washington, much less heard.

It not only caught the attention of lawmakers, it also helped transform the farm bill into a question about equity and whether the country's wealthiest farmers should be paid to grow commodity crops while many smaller family farms receive nothing and are going out of business.

In farm circles, where neighbors now know who is receiving the biggest checks from the government, the Web site has name recognition roughly equal to that of Heinz ketchup.

"Now I understand how my `farmer' brother-in-law can afford a $400,000 condo at the beach, despite all his poor-mouthing," a Texas woman wrote after searching the Web site.

To the uninitiated, the small, specialized niche on the World Wide Web looks like an overnight success. Since going public in November, it has recorded 20 million searches.

But Mr. Cook said the site was the culmination of his life of thinking about farms and the environment.

His grandfather Samuel Cook founded the family ranch outside Roselle, Mo., in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. His uncle inherited the farm. Ken Cook grew up in a St. Louis suburb after his father died when he was 5 years old. But the large Cook family, headed by his uncle Paul, took him in every summer and most holidays, teaching him to cut and bale hay and tend to the calves on the family's 1,000-acre spread. He is anything but romantic about life at the Cook ranch.

"From a car window all those family farms look picturesque, but when you're living it, it can be endless chores," he said. "The barnyard. The pastures. I loved it."

Mr. Cook studied agriculture and history at the University of Missouri, and later received a master's degree in soil science.

His early goal, he said, was to put his education to work protecting the environment and places like the Cook farm.

But most of the decisions about farming and the environment were being made in Washington, so he moved here in 1977 and spent the next 15 years trying to find a suitable job.

"It wasn't an easy time," Mr. Cook said. "There was almost no room for conservation programs on the farm while farmers were planting fence post to fence post."

As an agriculture analyst at the Congressional Research Service, Mr. Cook learned the value of analyzing government data for lawmakers.

"I got lucky and worked with a great agricultural economist, Barry Carr, who taught me how to think about agriculture policy," he said.

Later, as a freelance writer, he got to know the ways of the Washington press corps.

When he and Richard Wiles founded the Environmental Working Group in 1993, they dedicated themselves to research with political punch. All research projects had to include plans showing how the project could open the political debate and be used by journalists.

They spent their $2 million annual budget on computer database experts, large computer servers and salaries for the 20 people who work at the group's offices in Dupont Circle. The money is raised from nonprofit benefactors like the Joyce Foundation.

The farm subsidy database was the first big project.

It took roughly six years to cultivate: four years of filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what was available and get the information from the government and two years of the tedious work of compiling the data and putting the information on the Web site.

"We figured that the power of information alone would do more than we could accomplish lobbying or writing elaborate reports," Mr. Cook said. "The data shows what farmers already knew — the big farms are getting bigger and driving out the smaller farms, thanks to big government subsidies."

The group's success has brought opponents.

Representative Larry Combest, Republican of Texas and chairman of the Agriculture Committee, accused the group last week of trying to eliminate all support for farmers.

"This is a conservation group that would like to take every dollar in a farm bill and spend it on environmental programs, have no farm programs at all," Mr. Combest said on a radio interview with KPAN in Hereford, Tex.

For Mr. Cook, statements like that, and others that accuse him of being a city slicker without a soul, are vindication that he was right to follow his first impulse and stick to what he knew.

"In my mind, when I talk about water pollution from farm runoff I see the charts and the data, but I also see the pollution in the family creek on our farm," he said. "That was from mining. We work on mining, too."